Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology

by Bruce Sterling

  The walls of the lounge were inset with video monitors; one showed the orgy room, another a porn vid, another ran a Grid network satellite channel. On that one a newscaster was yammering about the attempted assassination, this time in technicki, and Rickenharp hoped Frankie wouldn’t notice it and make the connection. Frankie the Mirror was into taking profit from whatever came along, and the SA paid for information.

  Frankie sat on the torn blue vinyl couch, hunched over the pocket-sized terminal on the coffee table. Frankie’s customer was a disco ’mo with a blue sharkfin flare, steroid muscles, and a white karate robe; the guy was standing to one side, staring at the little black canvas bag of blue packets on the coffee table as Frankie completed the transaction.

  Frankie was black. His bald scalp had been painted with reflective chrome; his head was a mirror, reflecting the TV screens in fish-eye miniature. He wore a pinstriped three-piece gray suit. A real one, but rumpled and stained like he’d slept in it, maybe fucked in it. He was smoking a Nat Sherman cigarette, down to the gold filter. His synthcoke eyes were demonically red. He flashed a yellow grin at Rickenharp. He looked at Willow, Yukio, and Carmen, made a mocking scowl. “Fucking narcs—get more fancy with their setups every day. Now they got four agents in here, one of ’em looks like my man Rickenharp, other three took like refugees and a computer designer. But that Jap hasn’t got a camera. Gives him away.”

  “What’s this ’ere about—” Willow began.

  Rickenharp made a dismissive gesture that said, He isn’t serious, dumbshit. “I got two purchases to make,” he announced and looked at Frankie’s buyer. The buyer took his packet and melted back into the warrens.

  “First off,” Rickenharp said, taking his card from his wallet, “I need some blue blow, three grams.”

  “You got it, homeboy.” Frankie ran a lightpen over the card, then punched a request for data on that account. The terminal asked for the private code number. Frankie handed the terminal to Rickenharp, who punched in his code, then erased it from visual. Then he punched to transfer funds to Frankie’s account. Frankie took the terminal and double-checked the transfer. The terminal showed Rickenharp’s adjusted balance and Frankie’s gain.

  “That’s gonna eat up half your account, Harpie,” Frankie said.

  “I got some prospects.”

  “I heard you and Mose parted company.”

  “How’d you get that so fast?”

  “Ponce was here buying.”

  “Yeah, well—now I’ve dumped the dead weight, my prospects are even better.” But as he said it he felt dead weight in his gut.

  “ ’S your bux, man.” Frankie reached into the canvas carry-on, took out three pre-weighed bags of blue powder. He looked faintly amused. Rickenharp didn’t like the look. It seemed to say, I knew you’d come back, you sorry little wimp.

  “Fuck off, Frankie,” Rickenharp said, taking the packets.

  “What’s this sudden squall of discontent, my child?”

  “None of your business, you smug bastard.”

  Frankie’s smugness tripled. He glanced speculatively at Carmen and Yukio and Willow. “There’s something more, right?”

  “Yeah. We got a problem. My friends here—they’re getting off the raft. They need to slip out the back way so Tom and Huck don’t see ’em.”

  “Mmm. What kind of net’s out for them?”

  “It’s a private outfit. They’ll be watching the copter port, everything legit … ”

  “We had another way off,” Carmen said suddenly. “But it was blown—”

  Yukio silenced her with a look. She shrugged.

  “Verr-rry mysterious,” Frankie said. “But there are safety limits to curiosity. Okay. Three grand gets you three berths on my next boat out. My boss’s sending a team to pick up a shipment. I can probably get ’em on there. That’s going east, though. You know? Not west or south or north. One direction and one only.”

  “That’s what we need,” Yukio said, nodding, smiling. Like he was talking to a travel agent. “East. Someplace Mediterranean.”

  “Malta,” Frankie said. “Island of Malta. Best I can do.” Yukio nodded. Willow shrugged. Carmen assented by her silence.

  Rickenharp was sampling the goods. In the nose, to the brain, and right to work. Frankie watched him placidly. Frankie was a connoisseur of the changes drugs made in people. He watched the change of expression on Rickenharp’s face. He watched Rickenharp’s visible shift into ego drive.

  “We’re gonna need four berths, Frankie,” Rickenharp said.

  Frankie raised an eyebrow. “You better decide after that shit wears off.”

  “I decided before I took it,” Rickenharp said, not sure if it was true.

  Carmen was staring at him. He took her by the arm and said, “Talk to you a minute?” He led her out of the lounge, into the dark hallway. The skin of her arm was electrically sweet under his fingers. He wanted more. But he dropped his hand from her and said, “Can you get the bux?”

  She nodded. “I got a fake card, dips into—well, it’ll get it for us. I mean, for me and Yukio and Willow. I’d have to get authorization to bring you. And I can’t do that.”

  “Know what? I won’t help you get out otherwise.”

  “You don’t know—”

  “Yeah, I do. I’m ready to go. I just go back and get my guitar.”

  “The guitar’ll be a burden where we’re going. We’re going into occupied territory, to get where we want to be. You’d have to leave the guitar.”

  He almost wavered at that. “I’ll check it into a locker. Pick it up someday. Thing is—if they watched us with that bird, they saw me with you. They’ll assume I’m part of it. Look, I know what you’re doing. The SA’s looking for you. Right? So that means you’re—”

  “Okay, hold it, shit; keep your voice down. Look—I can see where maybe they marked you, so you got to get off the raft, too. Okay, you go with us to Malta. But then you—”

  “I got to stay with you. The SA’s everywhere. They marked me.”

  She took a deep breath and let it out in a soft whistle through her teeth. She stared at the floor. “You can’t do it.” She looked at him. “You’re not the type. You’re a fucking artist.”

  He laughed. “You say that like it’s the lowest insult you can come up with. Look—I can do it. I’m going to do it. The band is dead. I need to … ” He shrugged helplessly. Then he reached up and took her sunglasses off, looked at her shadowed eyes. “And when I get you alone I’m going to batter your cervix into jelly.”

  She punched him hard in the shoulder. It hurt. But she was smiling. “You think that kind of talk turns me on? Well, it does. But it’s not going to get you into my pants. And as for going with us—What you think this is? You’ve seen too many movies.”

  “The SA’s marked me, remember? What else can I do?”

  “That’s not a good enough reason to … to become part of this thing. You got to really believe in it, because it’s hard. This is not a celebrity game show.”

  “Jesus. Give me a break. I know what I’m doing.”

  That was bullshit. He was trashed. He was blown. My computer’s experiencing a power surge. Motherboard fried. Hell, then burn out the rest.

  He was living a fantasy. But he wasn’t going to admit it. He repeated, “I know what I’m doing.”

  She snorted. She stared at him. “Okay,” she said.

  And after that everything was different.

  PAUL DI FILIPPO

  * * *

  Stone Lives

  * * *

  Paul Di Filippo is a newly published writer whose body of work is still small. Yet his work is already attracting attention for its ambitious scope and weirdly visionary imagery.

  The following piece, which appeared in 1985, was his third published story. With its theme of transformation, radical social change, and the impact of new technologies, it demonstrates Di Filippo's firm grasp of the cyberpunk dynam
ic. He lives in Providence, Rhode Island.

  Odors boil around the Immigration Offices, a stenchy soup. The sweat of desperate men and women, ripe garbage strewn in the packed street, the spicy scent worn by one of the guards at the outer door. The mix is heady, almost overpowering to anyone born outside the Bungle, but Stone is used to it. The constant smells constitute the only atmosphere he has ever known, his native element, too familiar to be despised.

  Noise swells to rival the stench. Harsh voices raised in dispute, whining voices lowered to entreat. “Don’t sluff me, you rotty bastard!” “l’d treat you real nice, honey, for a share of that.” From the vicinity of the door into Immigration, an artificial voice is reciting the day’s job offerings, cycling tirelessly through the rotty choices.

  “—to test new aerosol antipersonnel toxins. 4M will contract to provide survivors with a full Citrine rejuve. High-orbit vakheads needed by McDonnell Douglas. Must be willing to be imprinted—”

  No one seems eager to rush forward and claim these jobs. No voices beg the guards for entrance. Only those who have incurred impossible debts or enmity inside the Bungle ever take a chance on the Rating-10 assignments, which are Immigation’s disdainful handouts. Stone knows for sure that he wants no part of these rigged propositions. Like all the rest, he is here at Immigration simply because it provides a focal point, a gathering place as vital as a Serengeti water hole, where the sneaky sluffs and raw deals that pass for business in the South Bronx FEZ—a.k.a. the Bronx Jungle, a.k.a. the Bungle—can he transacted.

  Heat smites the noisy crowd, making them more irritable than usual—a dangerous situation. Hyperalertness parches Stone’s throat. He reaches for the scratched-to-his-touch plastic flask at his hip and swigs some stale water. Stale but safe, he thinks, relishing his secret knowledge. It was pure luck that he ever stumbled upon the slow leak in the inter-FEZ pipe down by the river fence that encircles the Bungle. He smelled the clean water like a dog from a distance, and by running his hands along several meters of chilly pipe, he found the drip. Now he has all the manifold cues to its exact location deeply memorized.

  Shuffling through the crowd on bare calloused feet (amazing what information can he picked up through the soles to keep body and soul intact!), Stone quests for scraps of information that will help him survive another day in the Bungle. Survival is his main—his only—concern. If Stone has any pride left, after enduring what he has endured, it is pride in surviving.

  A brassy voice claims, “I booted some tempo, man, and that was the end of that fight. Thirty seconds later, all three’re dead.” A listener whistles admiringly. Stone imagines he latches on somehow to a boot of tempo and sells it for an enormous profit, which he them spends on a dry, safe place to sleep and enough to fill his ever-empty gut. Not damn likely, but a nice dream nonetheless.

  Thought of food causes his stomach to churn. Across the rough, encrusted cloth covering his midriff, he rests his right hand with its sharp lance of pain that marks the infected cut. Stone assumes the infection. He has no way of telling for sure until it begins to stink.

  Stone’s progress through the babble of voices and crush of flesh has brought him fairly close to the entrance to Immigration. He feels a volume of empty air between the crowds and the guards, a quartersphere of respect and fear, its vertical face the wall of the building. The respect is generated by the employed status of the guards; the fear by their weapons.

  Someone—a transported felon with a little education—once described the guns to Stone. Long, bulky tubes with a bulge halfway along their length where the wiggler magnets are. Plastic stocks and grips. They emit charged beams of energetic electrons at relativistic speeds. If the scythe of the beam touches you, the kinetic energy imparted blows you apart like a squashed sausage. If the particle beam chances to miss, the accompanying cone of gamma rays produces radiation sickness that is fatal within hours.

  Of the explanation—which Stone remembers verbatim—he understands only the description of a horrible death. It is enough.

  Stone pauses a moment. A familiar voice—that of Mary, the rat-seller—is speaking conspiratorially of the next shipment of charity clothes. Stone deduces her position as being on the very inner edge of the crowd. She lowers her voice. Stone can’t make out her words, which are worth hearing. He edges forward, leery though he is of being trapped inside the clot of people—

  A dead silence. No one is speaking or moving. Stone senses displaced air puff from between the guards: someone occupies the door.

  “You.” A refined woman’s voice. “Young man with no shoes, in the—” Her voice hesitates for the adjective hiding beneath the grime. “—red jumpsuit. Come here, please. I want to talk to you.”

  Stone doesn’t know if it is he (red?), until he feels the pressure of all eyes upon him. At once he pivots, swerves, fakes—but it is too late. Dozens of eager claws grab him. He wrenches. Moldy fabric splits, but the hands refasten on his skin. He bites, kicks, pummels. No use. During the struggle he makes no sound. Finally he is dragged forward, still fighting, past that invisible line that marks another world as surely as does the unbreachable fence between the Bungle and the other twenty-two FEZ.

  Cinnamon scent envelops him, a guard holds something cold and metallic to the back of his neck. All the cells in his skull seem to flare at once, then darkness comes.

  Three people betray their forms and locations to the awakened Stone by the air they displace, their scents, their voices—and by a fourth, subtle component he has always labeled sense-of-life.

  Behind him: a bulky man who breathes awkwardly, no doubt because of Stone’s ripe odor. This has to be a guard. To his left: a smaller person—the woman?—smelling like flowers. (Once Stone smelled a flower.)

  Before him, deskbound: a seated man.

  Stone feels no aftereffects from the device used on him—unless the total disorientation that has overtaken him is it. He has no idea why he has been shanghaied, and wishes only to return to the known dangers of the Bungle.

  But he knows they are not about to let him.

  The woman speaks, her voice the sweetest Stone has ever heard.

  “This man will ask you some questions. Once you answer them, I’11 have one for you. Is that all right?”

  Stone nods, his only choice as he sees it.

  “Name?” says the Immigration official.

  “Stone. “

  “That’s all?”

  “That’s all anyone calls me.” (Unbearable white-hot pain when they dug out the eyes of the little urchin they caught watching them carve up the corpse. But he never cried, oh, no; and so: Stone.)

  “Place of birth?”

  “This shitheap, right here. Where else?”

  “Parents?”

  “What’re they?”

  “Age?”

  A shrug.

  “That can be fixed later with a cellscan. I suppose we have enough to issue your card. Hold still now.”

  Stone feels multiple pencils of warmth scroll over his face; seconds later, a chuntering sound from the desk.

  “This is your proof of citizenship and access to the system. Don’t lose it.”

  Stone extends a hand in the direction of the voice, receives a plastic rectangle. He goes to shove it into a pocket, finds them both ripped away in the scuffle, and continues to hold the plastic awkwardly, as if it is a brick of gold about to be snatched away.

  “Now my question.” The woman’s voice is like a distant memory Stone has of love. “Do you want a job?”

  Stone’s trip wire has been brushed. A job they can’t even announce in public? It must so fracking bad that it’s off the common corporate scale.

  “No thanks, miz. My life ain’t much, but it’s all I got.” He turns to leave.

  “Although I can’t give you details until you accept, we’ll register a contract right now that stipulates it’s a Rating-1 job.”

  Stone stops dead. It has to be a sick joke. But what
if it’s true?

  “A contract?”

  “Officer,” the woman commands.

  A key is tapped, and the desk recites a contract. To Stone’s untutored ears, it sounds straightforward and without traps. A Rating-1 job for an unspecified period, either party able to terminate the contract, job description to be appended later.

  Stone hesitates only seconds. Memories of all the frightful nights and painful days in the Bungle swarm in his head, along with the hot central pleasure of having survived. Irrationally, he feels a moment’s regret at leaving behind the secret city spring he so cleverly found. But it passes.

  “I guess you need this to O.K. it,” Stone says, offering up his newly won card.

  “I guess we do,” the woman says with a laugh.

  The quiet, sealed car moves through busy streets. Despite the lack of outside noise, the chauffeur’s comments on the traffic and their frequent halts are enough to convey a sense of the bustling city around them.

  “Where are we now?” Stone asks for the tenth time. Besides wanting the information, he loves to hear this woman speak. Her voice, he thinks—its’s like a spring rain when you’re safe inside.

  “Madison-Park FEZ, traveling crosstown.”

  Stone nods appreciatively. She may as well have said, “In orbit, blasting for the moon,” for all the fuzzy mental image he gets.

  Before they would let Stone leave, Immigration did several things to him. Shaved all his body hair off; deloused him; made him shower for ten minutes with a mildly abrasive soap; disinfected him; ran several instant tests; pumped six shots into him; and issued him underwear, clean coveralls, and shoes (shoes!)

  The alien smell of himself only makes the woman’s perfume more at tractive. In the close confines of the backseat, Stone swims in it. Finally he can contain himself no longer.

  “Uh, that perfume—what kind is it?”

  “Lily of the valley.”

  The mellifluous phrase makes Stone feel as if he is in another, kinder century. He swears he will always remember it. And he will.